Maldonado had previously gone with a party to the ocean in fruitless search of the ships, but found marks made by Alercon on a tree, at the foot of which was a letter; in it they told of their arrival, of their sailing quite a distance up the Colorado River, of their finding that they were in a Gulf instead of on the Ocean, and that, not finding the army, they were starting on their return trip. There is no record of their ever having reached home. If they had been on the Ocean instead of in the Gulf of California, and could have sailed on North, and had discovered the mild climate of California and its luxuriant foliage, unquestionably Spain would have colonized that country, the Rocky Mountains would have been the dividing wall between Spanish Territory and that of the United States, and Dewey, instead of going to the Philippines to fight the Spanish fleet, would have bombarded the Spanish City of San Francisco and have sunk their ships at the Golden Gate. The Pacific Ocean was then unknown. It had only been discovered twenty years before, when Magalhaes in 1520 sailed into its South American waters, and called it "Pacific" because of its calmness as compared with the storms which he had just encountered. Field Marshal Garcia Cardenas led a party westward, and found the Colorado River at the point now known as the Grand Canon of Arizona, where the river is seven thousand feet deep in the ground, and where the mighty rushing torrent is so far below, that it seems like a thread winding its way at the bottom of that wonderful gorge, to which the party tried in vain to descend. He was gone eighty days, and reported, upon his return, that the river was a barrier so frightful and insurmountable, that it would bar investigations to the westward forever.